The Man With No Name

More Podcasting Heck

Damn, this podcasting can make you feel like an idiot. I make my living doing perl and php programming and this setting up of a stupid podcast is so hard.

My goal: To set up a podcast of my various music projects.

But it’s a bit complicated, because for right now, I am doing piano improvisations, and also some recordings of my jazz combo. I want friends and family to hear all of them, but I thought it might be fun to put the piano improvisation series up on iTunes. Since I can’t put the jazz stuff up on iTunes (standards == copyright considerations), I need multiple podcasts.

The perfect place to host these podcasts is over at museworld since that’s my music site. Museworld is currently running wordpress.

My first problem was that I was on 1.5.1, and I was running into bizarre http errors (403) where the podcast feed would expire after a day. Took some research (too much research) but it turned out it was a “known issue” with 1.5.1 . That version was crazy with its rss2 support anyway so I started using feedburner instead.

So I upgraded to 2.0.2 today, which fixed the 403 problem, and I was ready to figure out how to do multiple podcasts.

It’s of course very easy to assign different blog posts to different categories in wordpress, which is how I wanted to set up the multiple podcast – one podcast per category.

So then it should be simple to have a different rss feed for each category, right? Nooooooooo, Wilbur. It’s not. It’s not simple at all.

You can get an rss feed to spit out entries only in one category, but the problem is that the rss feed is always named after my blog rather than the category. So that means it’s impossible for anyone to subscribe to these multiple podcasts in iTunes. Which is really frigging lame.

And here’s where I feel stupid – I tried hacking wordpress’s wp-rss2.php (which I shouldn’t have to do anyway) to change the channel’s “title” and “url” if it’s a per-category feed, and I just flat-out couldn’t figure out how to do it, at least not inside of two hours, which is where my aggravation level boils over when I’m not getting paid. There’s something about the wordpress team’s bizarre inside-out coding methodology… a simple frigging “print” wouldn’t work. Why can’t more people program in a way that is intuitive to people that might not be familiar with the codebase?

So anyway, as far as I’m concerned, it is currently impossible (meaning, “unsupported” in a way that means that if you roll your own solution, it will break when you upgrade) to do multiple podcasts on one wordpress installation. And that is really frigging lame, given my desire to figure out a way to put together a podcast network with multiple channels. I dislike movable type, so I guess I’m in the hunt for another system that has better multiple-podcast support.